Soft wrap, huge files and text encodings in Skink

Soft wrap

Run :wrap, or pick View → Soft wrap in the menu bar (F10). Long lines wrap at the window edge in this tab, and continued rows show ↪ instead of a line number. ↑, ↓, Home, End and the wheel move by screen row.

To wrap every file, or one language:

{
  "softwrap": true,
  "[markdown]": { "softwrap": true }
}

Lines break at spaces. "wordwrap": false breaks anywhere, which suits minified code.

Big files

File size	What you get
Under 8 MB	Everything: colours, language server, editing
8 MB and up	Editable, but no syntax colours and no language server (marked LARGE)
16 MB and up	Loads in the background; keep working in other tabs meanwhile
256 MB and up	The large-file view

The large-file view is read-only and reads straight from disk, so a 2 GB log takes a few MB of memory. Lines show while the file is indexed, and a log that grows is indexed again. Scrolling, Go to line, Find and copying (up to 64 MB) work. Find looks at one line at a time and pauses on a long search: search again to go on.

SKINK_BG_LOAD_BYTES and SKINK_HUGE_BYTES change the 16 MB and 256 MB limits.

Text encodings

Skink keeps a file’s encoding: UTF-8 (with or without BOM), UTF-16 and legacy ones like windows-1252, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, GBK, Big5, EUC-KR and KOI8-R. Those open editable and save back in the same encoding. The status line names any encoding that isn’t plain UTF-8.

Command	Does
:encoding	Show the file’s encoding
:encoding utf-8	Save in that encoding from now on (latin1, sjis, gbk, …)
:reopen NAME	Read the file again as NAME, when Skink guessed wrong

A save refuses characters the encoding can’t hold and names the first one. Binary files open read-only, so a save can’t damage them.